When I first heard about that new Sci Fi flick “Pacific Rim”, and when I saw the early trailers, my first reaction was to immediately question whether this was some sort of Godzilla rip-off. Like a lot of Sci Fi nerd types I was a huge fan of Godzilla as a kid, and the idea of trying to manufacture some kind of ‘new’ Godzilla movie designed to glide right on by thousands of blissfully unaware younger generation viewers kinda pissed me off. I wasn’t having it.

So I wrote a tweet saying essentially that this looked like it was gonna be some cheesy rip-off of the real thing (although strangely enough, unlike many critics, I thought the actual Godzilla remake with Matthew Broderick was great). Wasn’t more than 10 minutes after I released that opinion into the twitterverse that I got a response from a friend of mine, a professor, whom I hadn’t heard from in quite some time telling me that I was way off base on this one. He listed three movies that he had to see this summer, and Pacific Rim was on that list. Suffice to say I never would have pegged this guy as a lover of Sci Fi so I was pleasantly surprised, even if he was calling me out.

So last Sunday I went to see the flick. My friend was right. Pacific Rim is a great time. Not that it doesn’t gleefully borrow elements from Godzilla and other movies and forms as well, but not in a way that I would characterize as a rip-off. You don’t rip somebody’s off with respect, and this is a movie done with great respect to the movies that have come before it in the genre, the same way Quentin Tarantino so masterfully pays his respects in practically each and every frame. Not that I would equate this flick with anything like Pulp Fiction, but it’s still a lot of fun,. And in the end, that’s pretty much all I ask from movies these days.

What I like most about this movie is that it recognizes what it is and doesn’t try and run from it or pretend to be something more grand and ‘deep’. This is a monster movie, plain and simple. A good ole monster movie, man. And for all those out there who love your monster movies straight no chaser with big angry beasts doing all the wonderfully destructive things that big angry beasts do, then this is the flick for you.